SUPERHUMAN LIFE No. 12

WHY ARE WE NOT BORN WITH IT?

by Ernest O'Neill

We've seen instances in the history of mankind when a kind of
supernatural life has shown itself. We've all read fantasy stories of
supernatural beings and magic spells, but these instances are different
from those. For one thing, they are documented in historical records that
are beyond dispute some of the most reliable we possess. For another
thing, they have been handed down by people who have been some of the most
respected and tested men and women in society. For another, many of these
events brought death and persecution to the people who told of them.

This supernatural life has transformed physical sickness into health,
and enabled thousands of people to cross dry deserts because of water that
sprang from rocks when struck by men who exercised faith in the Maker of
the world. It has changed the most cruel, savage men into kindly and
gentle people. It has enabled others to leap out of depression and
anxiety, into joy. It has even destroyed death and its power to end life.
It seemed to reach zenith in the first century of our present era when a
man called Jesus healed lepers paralytics, and raised people from death
through touching them and exercising faith in the Creator whom he called
His father. Even today, people experience the power of this life in their
own personal day to day lives: they know that it is able to transcend the
limitations we all so often experience in our natural lives.

Why then were we not born with this supernatural life? The answer is we
were! But we refused it? But how could we? After all, we were given breath
and blood circulation without any conditions or an option to refuse. Why
was this supernatural life not given in the same unconditional way?

Because the Creator of the world wanted friends who would love Him
because they wanted to -- that's what love is. It's freely giving yourself
to another person for their uses whatever it costs you. That's what He did
when He made us --and that's why He made us -- so that we would do the
same for Him. This meant that He had to make us like Himself in every way
-- especially in this matter of free will. He is a self-determining Being:
He had to make us the same! How did He do it? After all, it is surely the
most difficult thing to do in the universe -- to make a being that would
be absolutely free from you -- free to oppose you if it wanted. We human
beings just wouldn't do it -- it's too dangerous!

But this is what Our Maker did. He made our bodies of earth from the
ground breathed in His own spirit of life, and we developed living souls
or psychological capacities (Genesis 2:7). Thus He made us like Himself --
in His own image with the same physical, intellectual, emotional, and
spiritual capabilities as He has. Only if we were capable of the same
attitudes and feelings as Him would we be able to love Him. However, the
essence of His nature is not these capacities but His own spirit and inner
attitude of perfect love and purity. These He has chosen of His own will.
They exist only in His Spirit of life. He could not give this
freely?chosen nature to us by compulsion as He gave us our physical,
mental and spiritual capacities: such an act would be a contradiction --
an impossibility. The only thing He could do was to make it available to
us -- so that we could choose it if we wanted!

This is what He did. In Genesis 2:9 "and out of the ground the Lord
God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for
food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of
the knowledge of good and evil." In verse 1, the choice is clearly
presented -- "and the Lord God commanded the man, saying 'You may
freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you
shall die!"'

In other words, right from the beginning of man's existence on the earth
the tree of life -- the supernatural life of God's own Spirit -- was
available to enable him to develop the world by intuition and superhuman
powers. Thus we would have been able to find the oil and the minerals
through God's own guidance to the places He had buried them. Our minds
would have been utterly unimpaired, our emotions balanced, and our wills
strong. The world would have been filled with God's own life of harmony,
and the order that God placed in Eden would have spread throughout the
universe. If we had chosen to trust His direction to take His spirit-life
into us by faith. But we thought we could become like Him and be
independent of Him. We thought we could develop the world through trial
and error by our own knowledge of good and evil. We thought that imitating
Him was enough and rejected the closer relationship of trusting Him not
only for what we could see but also for what we couldn't see.

Immediately that happened, we broke the mystic bond between us and Him
and sank into a coarse existence that lost sensitivity to the world.
Instead of controlling and developing it by His spirit?life we sank under
its domination. Lacking His rule through free-will agents, the earth
itself veered out of His will and fell into the power of the spirits He
had permitted to test our free will. The only thing Our Maker could do was
to withdraw the superhuman life of His spirit from our grasp to prevent us
misusing it to spread our chaos throughout the universe (Genesis 3:22-24).
From that moment on, we human beings have been born with only the natural,
created life of God's destructible image while the supernatural, uncreated
life of His indestructible image has been removed from our grasp. Let's
look in the next article sat the effects of this deprivation on the way
you and I live our lives today.